Set summoned the rest of Un Azameio to him, and as the great beast poured through the air towards him, another of the enemy, this one sheathed in blue ice and whose head looked like the head of an axe, had both his open hands raised, one over the other, ready to bring them down—much like an axe. Behind him and supporting him were three others in horse stance, each with his hands outstretched to press upon the back of the man in front.
“Do it Jarro!” Set heard someone cry.
The axe man brought his hands down as Un Azameio passed over him. His hands shone snowy white, and their effect was clear. From where his hands had penetrated the underbelly of Un Azameio, ice had spread throughout the beast like a time-lapsed infection until its entirety was frozen solid. The last of the three support men was unfortunate enough to have his head and chest caught within the liquid as it froze, the ice creeping down his torso, stopping at his waist.
Set was incensed. He was too far away from the ocean to summon enough liquid to remake Un Azameio. He bolted for the axe man as another day-bright flash lit the heavens then made the sea light up with a dazzling reflection. Set ignored the light, and as he drew near his quarry, he casually struck the depending torso which snapped off and fell to the ground. From the icy top of the partial corpse came actual ice cubes, this time not back but bright red, spilling out over the ground like morbid candy. The other support men had run, and though the man called Jarro stood ready to fight, he would not get the chance.
Before the two were close enough to engage each other, a gleaming silvery man descended between them. From the descriptions he’d heard, Set thought that this must be a Gun Golem, but then it spoke.
“I will take this one, Jarro,” the steely man said, a white-gold Halo rising up from his shoulders to surround his head.
“Yes, Sar Fosso,” Jarro said and was gone.
Set barely heard. He stared, transfixed for the tiniest moment. The Halo writhed like a ribbon of light in the wind.
• • •
Abanastar used a variety of arrangements of lenses to keep an eye on the front line from his rearward position. In this way, he watched thousands and thousands pour through the rip in space. The gene soldiers were not a complete waste. They were well-equipped to engage a percentage of the enemy, but the remaining percentage, along with the steady flow of reinforcements would wipe them out in time. Abanastar stopped, allowing the rest of the line to continue on without him, and looked to the sky. Immediately above was a thick pall of smoke and fine, particulate debris, but his senses were not halted there. High above, through the still-roiling blacks and grays, he could see the sun, and he would bring the power of that sun down upon the natives, turning their warm source of sustenance into death.
For a full minute Abanastar stood staring at the dark, shifting sky through the inscrutable Focusing Lens. When he lowered his head to look forward again, the undersides of the clouds, all moving and beautifully textured, were lit with lightning light which spread instantly like molten gold and then, just as quickly, winked out. A hole opened up in the heavens and a column of focused sunlight, two hundred meters in diameter, yellow-white and solid, struck the ground just before the rip in space.
Even as far back as he was, Abanastar heard the screams unaided, but through his lenses, he watched bodies rising up, burning to ash as they climbed the super-heated air left in the wake of the spent sunbeam. He saw with some satisfaction that the rip began to close. Space began to reknit from both ends, closing, closing, racing towards a shrinking aperture at the center until that too was sealed.
After another minute, a new arrangement of lenses—the previous ones destroyed by the intensity of their payload—was in place with a new target selected, this time a couple hundred meters from where the rip had been, to singe the rear of the enemy advance. The hole in the clouds flashed white, and molten gold returned to flow through the velvet ridges and under valleys of the cloud bottoms. This time, though, before the column of light could touch town, it struck something unseen high above ground, bending at a right angle and then scattering in a fan out over the sea.
Abanstar started. He was wholly unprepared for anyone or anything co-opting his power. Once more he set about arranging the lenses, but was skeptical about how effective they might be from here on out, nor was his skepticism unwarranted. The sunbeam came with all its glorious light play among the clouds, but again, it bent ninety degrees, this time losing none of its focus, and lining straight for the Root Palace.
The bar of light lanced the Palace, blackening its surface and igniting a great, though strangely transparent, blaze of red-orange. Thick oily smoke rose up from the fringes of the flames to join the lid that blotted out most of the sky.
Despite what it looked like, Abanastar knew his power, knew that the Palace and its occupants were in no real danger. There would be injuries certainly, but no fatalities, and the fire would burn itself out or Palace personnel would extinguish it. He sighed, realizing that he could no longer rely on broad strokes, that he would have to bloody his knuckles. It wasn’t the first time. And as if to punctuate his resignation to the inevitable, Abanastar found himself beset by a flood of enemy soldiers.
• • •
Vays couldn’t stand to wait. After signaling his intentions to his fellows, he broke from the rear line, sprinting forward as he drew the Titan Saber from his helmet. The Saber flashed, cutting through the first three who crossed his path. He sank into the mire of gene soldiers and enemy troops, those with faces and those without, the latter with Haloes of light and dark surrounding their heads, Haloes that inspired a new species of dread in him. For the second time in his life, the first on the battlefield, he experienced panic, though it was mild and served to supplement his adrenaline.
Through the chaos, Vays only knew that the armor provided by the Titan Star was proof against nearly all that was brought against him. He felt knocks and tugs, heat and cold, but nothing as yet had penetrated. The Saber was equally as effective offensively. The normal enemy troops he split in half, through torsos or down through crowns. The other ones, the ones with the Haloes, were more durable, required more effort in the way of both speed and strength. But these, too, he cleaved and killed, or at least he thought he did.
He moved through the crowd, sometimes taking a gene soldier along with one of the enemy, and began to notice a pair of baleful eyes boring into him. Whichever direction he turned, from behind an opponent, from between two gene soldiers with their backs to him, that same pair of bloodshot eyes, nearly jutting from their sockets, stabbed him, pressed him, crushed him with accusation. It was uncanny how the owner of those eyes seemed to be everywhere at once. There was something different about him as well, some knowing quality, which was ultimately meaningless since the Viscain brought only death with them. But those eyes, clear and perfectly visible through a gap in shroud rags, were always in a position to meet him.
Vays was weary. He’d worked so hard, killed so many already; his energy was draining away. Sleep might be the answer. The eyes with the pressure of their accusation seemed to squeeze the resolve from him. He was dully aware of a flash that lit his surroundings, that turned day back to day from the false, cloud-induced night, but it seemed separate, outside, and only an unnecessary distraction to his much needed rest.
Though Vays felt himself move more and more slowly, he hadn’t actually moved at all for the last several minutes. He stood inert on the battlefield, his sword held loosely in his right hand, its tip digging slightly into the ground. Terrible acts of violence went on all around him. Sometimes he was the target of that violence, but the regular soldiers of this sixth planet could not breach the Titan Star’s defense. There was one among them Entitled by God who was having more luck, however.
All sound was becoming muted and merging together, like the insulated thump of a heartbeat, a return to the isolation and comfort of the womb. Vays had decided. The crippling accusation he felt, he realized, was his own nagging conscience. He’d done en
ough, and his conscience would abate once he let up and allowed himself to rest. He was so tired. But something clashed with the rhythmic pulse that was lulling him to oblivion, some discordant note that persisted until it rose to just beneath the surface of his impending slumber.
“Vayswhyarentyoumoving?” He heard the words as one unbroken stream of noise in his head.
“What?” he thought absently.
“Vays!”
“Who’s that?” Vays thought this, but wasn’t terribly interested in finding out.
“Vays! Wake up!”
“Kalkin? Kalkin, is that you?”
A moment later, Vays looked into the single filmy pearl that was Kalkin’s eye in his Darkened state. Kalkin’s giant hands gripped his shoulders and had been shaking him.
“Kalkin!” Vays cried, snapping to attention.
Still holding Vays’s shoulders, Kalkin scanned the crowd. “Someone in the middle of all this,” he said, “perhaps more than one, has powers subtle enough to bypass the Titan Star. Others may also be at risk. For now, stick with me. My RMP should be high enough to prevent domination. Are you all right?”
Vays nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
“What happened?”
Vays struggled for a simple explanation, but managed only to blurt out, “Eyes.”
“Eyes?” Kalkin cocked his mound of a head inquisitively and incredulity was clear in his voice.
But Vays was preoccupied once again, and once again it was with a pair of eyes. As before, through the crowd, beyond perhaps twenty men and gene soldiers, he saw the eyes, but he was certain of their reality now. His mind was clear and his ego in need of some repair, so he launched past his senior, breaking the bones of those in his path against the hard angles of his armor. He raised the Titan Saber high over head to bring it down viciously, separating those baleful eyes and the shroud rags that framed them, extinguishing their power for good and all. Before the halves of the freshly made corpse could fall, Vays unleashed the Star Factory upon them. The tip of his blade pistoned one hundred and eight times to create a wet red cloud of blood and meat.
• • •
Icsain had witnessed countless wars, with weapons ranging from clubs to space-based particle beam cannons, but he had never personally participated in any of them. The weapons at one’s disposal generally determined one’s strategy, and while Icsain had little to fear from the resident humans or their slightly more-evolved fellows, he did not fancy the idea of unnecessarily blemishing his perfect body. Using the Relic Cords, he fished, snaring hundreds of the enemy, mostly the normal human variety, but a few of the others. From these latter, he learned of their designation as Entitled by God, though what god was still a mystery. This information he spread among the rest of the Shades, only because he’d become rather tied to names and naming over his span of millennia.
He kept these enemy soldiers around him like a living shield as he progressed forward, making them fight for Viscain. His contribution was not at all dynamic, but it was methodical. He added more enemy normals as he went, feeling out the Entitled and taking them when possible as well.
• • •
Gran Kwes moved inexorably forward and did not step lightly. None caught under its massive hooves rose again. From atop its head, Barson pressed the first two fingers of his right hand downward, crushing distant individuals and small groups with localized gravity wells. Given the tumult below, there was no other tactic that made sense. He could descend and engage the enemy with his bare hands—his Dark bare hands—but so far that hadn’t proved necessary. If the need arose, he would respond to it.
As they progressed, Stafros Lowe keeping pace in the air thirty meters away at Barson’s left shoulder, they began to see a variety of powers being thrown against them. The normals carried small armaments with them, which made them, to some degree, negligible, but some of the others seemed much more capable. Barson could easily see from his vantage point that these others housed some unknown form of energy which manifested itself as Haloes of rippling light. This light ranged in color across the visible spectrum and in both directions beyond. He speculated, and was not wrong, that some of these individuals may be on par with Shades, that one of them had been responsible for the rift in space which had brought the them so close so fast. There had been the ring of light, the black smoke serpent which had reduced Gran Kwes’s leg, and now a great blaze of fire attempted to assault Un Azameio. It was just that, though, an attempt, and Set had matters well in hand.
Most of Tia’s harpy soldiers were further ahead, sniping the enemy from the air or swooping down to deliver hit-and-run attacks with their high-frequency pikes. They were making good progress in spite of some apparent weapons malfunctions until they started to drop from the sky like hailstones.
Barson and Stafros Lowe shared a concerned look, and Barson understood the other’s unspoken request. “Go,” he said through his Artifact.
Lowe nodded and shot forward with an unprecedented burst of speed. As he went he occasionally felt small projectiles ping off of his metallic skin. Less frequently, he felt more powerful impacts, but these did not penetrate and only forced him to correct his course. Focusing his attention on the scene below, he noticed the weapons that the majority of enemy troops carried. Some had rifles, but most had pistols. These weapons were a nuisance, but not a threat.
Continuing towards the massed harpy soldiers and noting his former squadmate’s progress, Lowe couldn’t help grinning beneath the faceplate of his steely frog helmet. Even now, Bela Fan exerted her power, a cone of white flashing out before her, freezing everything in its path, leaving frost draped statues, most of them frozen solid. Those who were not killed instantly in this manner, each one of them with a strange halo about his or her head, she addressed personally, either with another dose of her cryokinesis or with the expert application of her heavy, sinuous tail.
Current Squad members were doing no worse. Raus, a giant towering above the tide of swarming bodies, struck and crushed with his massive hands. At times electric current surrounded him like a glittering fog, causing skin to smoke, eyeballs to burst, and bowels to release. Jav, too, was tearing a path through the enemy, only slowing for—what was it Icsain called them?—those Entitled by God. Some exhibited a fair degree of martial prowess, but Jav was one of the most talented fighters Lowe had ever seen, and in his twelve hundred years of life, he’d seen many. Barson, his martial art well-complementing his psychic facility, was perhaps the strongest he’d ever encountered, but as for skill, Dolma Set was tied with Laedra Hol, and Jav was on par with them both. Neither Jav nor Raus had summoned additional troops from the ground as yet, and Lowe wondered if doing so would be of any benefit. Raus’s troops, with their renewability might, but let that be a trump to be played later.
He passed Un Azameio. If Set needed help, Lowe had no doubts that he would ask for it. Set had a sizable ego, but rarely did it encroach onto the battlefield. He’d learned his lessons and the value of teamwork while on Blue Squad.
The harpies had ceased to fall for a time, but now several more dropped like stones, and Lowe understood why. From amidst the enemy, still inaccessible to the merman gene soldiers, was one of the Entitled by God. His body was like white light. His Halo was the same, tight and narrow about his head. Lowe couldn’t help but be reminded of the 18th Generation General, Sana Bale with her Prismatic Scales. He’d always thought her beautiful while Dark. This Entitled was pure white light, different from Sana in his way, but at heart similar. With his shine he would have stood out more clearly, if not for the crowd around him. Lowe watched him put a hand of light to what would have been his temple then “swords” of the same white light shot forth, machine gun fast, each one piercing the heart of a harpy, killing it instantly.
Lowe had noted that there was a pause between volleys and used this to his advantage. Once the Entitled had fired off his limit, Lowe responded. The surface of the pods on his shoulders split down the middle, each opening like an eye and
revealing seven dark, wet nodules within. These, Lowe’s pollywog drones, launched like missiles, streaking towards the shining Entitled, leaving trails of evaporating moisture. The crowd around him was thick, though, and the first four of the drones simply exploded on contact like conventional missiles. These scattered the crowd to chunks and pieces, while the rest of the drones underwent their evolution, quickly growing, changing, metamorphosing into simple copies of Lowe himself. Ten copies alighted. They were gray and imperfect, covered with the protein-rich gelatinous slime that was their food and their substance.
More of the enemy soldiers had closed the open circle made by the explosions, rushing to support the Entitled. Lowe’s copies engaged them, succeeded in killing or crippling a few using a parody of Lowe’s Lead Cloud Steps at its most basic. Two of the copies succumbed to enemy group efforts, only to detonate as the missiles had, once sufficient pressure had caused their unstable “blood” to react.
That had been enough time for the Entitled to recharge, though.
• • •
Bela Fan had sensed first then confirmed with her eyes Un Azameio’s fate. Set’s faux Gran was still far ahead, but it glimmered like a diamond mountain in the light that descended from the heavens, then again when that light scattered over the sea. Her feelings for Dolma Set were complicated, but no one insulted Blue Squad, especially not Set, and especially not using ice and cold.
It took her no time at all to identify the perpetrator. He radiated cold like none of his fellows and registered blatantly upon Bela’s Dark, specialized senses. Stark winter white shot out before her, this time with such intensity that the icicle-festooned dead shattered under their own weight, so thoroughly did her cold and the resulting ice penetrate through their bodies. At the limit of the cone-shaped blast zone, the guilty Entitled stood, brought to a halt and humbled by the eruption of the frosty landscape before him. They regarded each other across that winterscape for a moment frozen and made still by Bela’s power, her writhing tail the only indication that time itself had not stopped. And then she was all sound and motion, screaming, limbs flailing, striking down the ice half-sculptures that had once been flesh and blood men and women. She crossed the distance between them in an instant and had her hands about the Entitled’s throat, though she had to reach up to do so. Her eyes flashed and before the man who had been known as Jarro Sessek could react, his life was snuffed out by a freezing rush. Cold, far more intense than he had ever been capable of producing on his own, had invaded his body, crystallizing every cell and making his neck brittle under the powerful grip of Bela’s hands. His head, now a double-crusted gem, dropped from its crumbled setting, landed on the ground heavily and cracked along a jagged crimson plane into two halves.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 30
